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On The Distracted Life

Distraction is a funny thing, we know it well and encounter it regularly in our daily life, but the more we think about it, the more slippery it becomes as a concept. There’s a good essay from The New Yorker which waxes philosophical on the distracted life: “A New Theory of Distraction.”

For one thing, we often define distraction in relation to attention:

“The modern world valorizes few things more than attention. It demands that we pay attention at school and at work; it punishes parents for being inattentive; it urges us to be mindful about money, food, and fitness; it celebrates people who command others’ attention.”

In the online world where there is more of everything than we can possibly focus on all at once, attention is the currency of the digital era. Distraction can be a liberation from boredom, or a way of upending a power dynamic by ‘wasting time’ on something that we freely choose to do rather than what we ‘should’ be doing. If we are so inclined, the question of distraction is also existential:

“Life often seems to be ‘about’ paying attention—and the general trend seems to be toward an ever more attentive way of life. Behind the crisis of distraction, in short, there is what amounts to a crisis of attention: the more valuable and in demand attention becomes, the more problematic even innocuous distractions seem to be … Getting distracted, from this perspective, is like falling asleep. It’s like hitting pause on selfhood.”